


Dune: Paul’s Women, Chapter 7 (Book II)

by Wodric



Series: Dune: Paul’s Women [21]
Category: Dune (1984), Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert's Dune (2000)
Genre: Anal Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Incest, Mother-Son Relationship, Oral Sex, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 16:47:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14289144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wodric/pseuds/Wodric
Summary: Chapter's summary:Jessica and Paul have a bindu training session in the tent. After some intense moment they depart and find the Fremen.See chapter 6 (Book II): https://archiveofourown.org/works/14284665See chapter 8 (Book II): https://archiveofourown.org/works/14303295





	Dune: Paul’s Women, Chapter 7 (Book II)

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter, in its original form by Frank Herbert, has one of the most interesting introductions: "In My Father’s House" by the Princess Irulan

Paul’s Atreides Women

Book Two: MUAD’DIB

Chapter 7

 

Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand, but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic - eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a matter of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I ’m not at all sure my father was innocent in all these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families. Here was a new slave-concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer’s muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: "She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift." You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.

\- "In My Father’s House" by the Princess Irulan

 

That morning, after a bindu training session they made love tenderly in the tent, so their sweat could be condensed in the water depots and reused. Then they felt asleep.

Paul had waken up. His mother was totally asleep, lying on her stomach. He slowly caressed her naked back, letting his hand slide down to her majestic buttocks. The curiosity lead him, he rose up silently and on his knees he positioned himself behind her, and slowly he spread apart her ass checks with both hands. She stirred but continued to sleep. Looking to her pink hole e regained an erection. To his memory came the images of that night in Caladan when he saw his father with her, and she had said:

“Tonight… I still want you from behind…”

He nested his penis between her buttocks, moved down, his penis leaving a trace of pre-cum all over her gully. But his member was too dry to try to get in, so we went further down and allowed his penis to begin to separate her inner lips, taunting her, playing with her to get some lubrication before entering. She moaned and moved her body under him.

“Again?” she asked still half-sleeping.

“Yes!” and he rammed her.

She didn’t even open her eyes. She just lay there slightly moving her hips and letting him do most of the work, but he sensed that her body reacted and she was more and more humid again.

When he felt that it could be enough e just leaved her and moved down, kissing her all over the back, until he spread wider her ass checks and begun to lick her with plenty of saliva. So much water spent there!

She was really sleepy because she just laugh without immediately realizing his intentions. She only realized it when he come up again and she felt the head of his hard penis touching her butt hole.

“No, Paul, wait, I am not ready…”

He pressed his head, their moist and his saliva helped him to get a bit in and like he saw his father doing, slowly, really slowly, very slowly, he begin to torn her apart, gaining space, letting her relax and breath. He saw his penis disappearing inside her as he pushed forward, removed just a little and pushed forward again even deeper.

Jessica finally opened her eyes, turned back to see him while her hands hold his legs tight above his knees.

“You need to prove something with this?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer, and continued his task, he just pushed and gave almost a shout of triumph when he saw his penis disappearing all in her. Then he just lost his control and begun pumping like a fool.

Each time he trusted forward her gorgeous ass checks would be pushed up in a delight to his eyes. He just raised his body and glued a hand in each of those mountains while he moved his hips in a constant acceleration.

This time his objective was not to last. He just wanted to reach the peak as soon as possible in that tiny hole that embraced and massaged his penis. He wanted to baptize her anus as quick as he could, in an inexplicable emergency. He needed it so he pumped his member in a crescendo, just fascinated with the movement that his constant thrusts made in her ass checks. When he went forward and completely filled her in, her hips and buttocks would rise so much from the tents floor that he would think that his penis would be bending inside her.

He entered quickly in an animalist state of euphoria and he cried out each time his penis would spur inside her, until her hole begun to leak his white cream, but he was still so hunger that he continued stroke after stroke until he couldn’t do no more, completely depleted of strength, and felt over his mother, kissing her nape, moving away her long hair, tasting the lobule of the ear, and playing with it between his tongue, his lips and his teeth.

“You were selfish, Paul, too selfish!” she said softly in her teacher mode. “You only thought in your pleasure. Making love is not only having pleasure, is mostly about giving!”

Paul felt ashamed.

“I saw you once with dad, doing this… and I wanted it…”

Suddenly she was angry with his comment, she begun to move…

“Get out of me…”

“But mom…”

“You begun to make love to me, you woken me up, and… without even relaxing me, you do this… at least finish the job that you begun…”

Jessica turned around completely, grabbed him by his hair and pushed his face against her sex. Just when Paul begun to lick her, she relaxed and understood that she was being hard with him. But like the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam had done with her she teached Paul in the mysteries of pleasuring a woman with the lips, the tongue, the mouth. Slowly she gave him instructions while she stroked tenderly his hair, stroking his hair like any other mother would do.

She was still angry, and in some way to punish him she delayed several times her orgasm, tiring him. But she smiled when she realized that he was not going to give up. He cupped her breasts, fondling them, pinching her nipples, and with the eagerness of any young man, he followed her instructions, diving between her legs, trying to redeem himself, licking her womanhood, playing with his lips around her clitoris, trying to penetrate her with his tongue in a manner that Jessica laugh pretty high. And licking, licking so much…

He was no Reverend Mother, but he was learning and improving. And Jessica begun to move her hips, against his face, while her hands held him between her legs, to a point that the poor boy had difficulties to breath. But he didn’t gave up when he saw his mother in that state of arousal, he just gained courage and continued as she had trained him, squeezing even more her breasts and felling his penis gaining life again once more.

Her hips were raised from the tent’s floor, his hands were removed from her breasts to grab her buttocks and help her to crush her sex against his face, and she didn’t delayed one more time. She just couldn’t. She trembled and jerked her hips again. She let it go and flooded her son’s face with her fluids.

“Come here…” she pushed him up so she could kiss him in the mouth, tenderly and taste her own humidity in his tongue. Soon they felt asleep embraced in each other’s arms.

Paul stood naked outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.

Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.

And the flatness.

His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon–no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze... only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.

What if there isn’t one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?

Within the tent, Jessica awakened in a languid nakedness, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul, He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.

Presently she refreshed herself with water from the tent’s catchpocket, and  
slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.

Paul spoke without turning: "I find myself enjoying the quiet here."

She embraced him and kissed him on the nape of his neck: “Even with all the misfortunes, we can have some small happy moments.”

How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom:

"The mind can go either direction under stress–toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training."

"It could be a good life here," Paul said, kissing her while his right hand caressed her long leg. With her breasts brushing his arm he couldn’t avoid to be erect again.

She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.

She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth... and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.

“Its better we get dressed, I’ll strike camp," Paul said hesitantly, caressing again her long nude legs.

Jessica nodded, her hands stroked Paul’s hair, with a finger she raised his head and kissed him deeply in the mouth, her tongue penetrating his lips, her teeth gritting his lower lip.

“First we need to take care of that erection.” She saw a smile in his lips and she pushed him continuously to the tents floor were she mounted him with her eyes closed.

At some point she sensed that he was on the edge. His hands were on her hips to making her move faster and faster. She was almost screaming his name “Leto…” when she opened her eyes and reminded herself who was under her. She bitted her lips, not in pleasure but to avoid pronouncing her Duke’s name. That would break Paul’s heart too much. He was now the Duke.

When he finished inside her, she left the tent, picked some gear and she walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung again her binoculars to the left. The binoculars would impede her to cry. She couldn’t waste water. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges–a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, begun to dress and adjust her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.

He came closer, embraced her and kissed her face.

“You don’t have to pretend with me. You were thinking about dad…”

The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.

Stars!

She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded.

There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.

"The first moon will be up soon," Paul said. "The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper."

We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.

The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.

"Smell that," Paul said.

"I can smell it even through the filter," she said. "Riches. But will it buy water?" She pointed across the basin. "There are no artificial lights across there."

"Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks," he said.

A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.

"I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse," Paul said. "Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes."

"Thirty minutes?"

"Before it starts calling... a... worm."

"Oh. I’m ready to go."

He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.

The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow... if we’re to have a tomorrow.

She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!

Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound–the desert’s own code spelling out its measure of safety.

"We must walk without rhythm," Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand... both prescient memory and real memory.

"Watch how I do it," he said. "This is how Fremen walk the sand."

He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.

Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand... like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step... drag... drag... step... step... wait... drag... step...

Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still lowered high.

"Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!"

It was a drumming from the cliff behind.

"The thumper," Paul hissed.

Its pounding continued and they found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.

"Lump... lump... lump... lump..."

They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step...drag... wait... step... Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag... wait... step...

And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.

The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew... louder and louder... out of the west.

"Lump... lump... lump... lump... " drummed the thumper.

The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.

"Keep moving," Paul whispered. "Don’t look back."

A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.

"Keep moving," Paul repeating.

He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces–the one ahead and the one behind–appeared equally remote.

And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.  
They moved on and on and on... Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning, escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.

Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking.

Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit’s catchpockets.

"Lump... lump... "

Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.

Silence!

"Faster," Paul whispered.

She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits – the unnatural movement...

The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.

Resonant booming shook the sand around them.

Paul lurched sideways two steps.

"Boom! Boom!"

"Drum sand!" Jessica hissed.

Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.

Behind them, he heard a hissing–like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.

"Run!" Jessica screamed. "Paul, run!"

They ran.

Drum sound boomed beneath their feet. Then they were out of it and into pea gravel. 

For a time, the running was a relief to muscles that ached from unfamiliar, rhythmless use. Here was action that could be understood. Here was rhythm. But sand and gravel dragged at their feet. And the hissing approach of the worm was storm sound that grew around them.

Jessica stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue and the sound and the terror.

Paul dragged her up.

They ran on, hand in hand.

A thin pole jutted from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.

Jessica’s mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.

There was another–wind-etched surface thrust up from a crack in rock.

Another.

Rock!

She felt it through her feet, the shock of unresisting surface, gained new strength from the firmer footing.

A deep crack stretched its vertical shadow upward into the cliff ahead of them. They sprinted for it, crowded into the narrow hole.

Behind them, the sound of the worm’s passage stopped.

Jessica and Paul turned, peered out onto the desert.

Where the dunes began, perhaps fifty meters away at the foot of a rock beach, a silver-gray curve broached from the desert, sending rivers of sand and dust cascading all around. It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.

The mouth snaked toward the narrow crack where Paul and Jessica huddled. Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.

Back and forth the great mouth wove.

Paul stilled his breathing.

Jessica crouched staring.

It took intense concentration of her Bene Gesserit training to put down the primal terrors, subduing a race-memory fear that threatened to fill her mind.

Paul felt a kind of elation. In some recent instant, he had crossed a time barrier into more unknown territory. He could sense the darkness ahead, nothing revealed to his inner eye. It was as though some step he had taken had plunged him into a well... or into the trough of a wave where the future was invisible. The landscape had undergone a profound shifting.

Instead of frightening him, the sensation of time-darkness forced a hyper- acceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter... crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim... the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes... acids...

The worm blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.

Paul crowded his mother farther back.

Cinnamon!

The smell of it flooded across him.

What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.

"Barrrroooom!"

It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.

Again: "Barrrroooom!"

The worm drew back onto the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth weaving moon-flashes.

"Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!"

Another thumper! Paul thought.

Again it sounded off to their right.

A shudder passed through the worm. It drew farther away into the sand. Only a mounded upper curve remained like half a bell mouth, the curve of a tunnel rearing above the dunes.

Sand rasped.

The creature sank farther, retreating, turning. It became a mound of cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.

Paul stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste toward the new thumper summons.

Jessica followed, listening: "Lump... lump... lump... lump... lump..."

Presently the sound stopped.

Paul found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.

Jessica focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the aftermath of terror.

"Has it gone for sure?" she whispered.

"Somebody called it," Paul said. "Fremen."

She felt herself recovering. "It was so big!"

"Not as big as the one that got our ’thopter."

"Are you sure it was Fremen?"

"They used a thumper."

"Why would they help us?"

"Maybe they weren’t helping us. Maybe they were just calling a worm."

"Why?"

An answer lay poised at the edge of his awareness, but refused to come. He had a vision in his mind of something to do with the telescoping barbed sticks in their packs–the "maker hooks."

"Why would they call a worm?" Jessica asked.

A breath of fear touched his mind, and he forced himself to turn away from his mother, to look up the cliff. "We’d better find a way up there before daylight." He pointed. 

"Those poles we passed–there are more of them."

She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the poles–wind-scratched markers–made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.

"They mark a way up the cliff," Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.

Jessica waited a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.

Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.

Paul tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge, but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness within the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could expect–a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.

They looked upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. He took her hand again. "If we could only risk a light," he whispered.

"We have other senses than eyes," she said.

Paul slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother’s arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.

Another step.

"It goes on up to the top, I think," he whispered.

Shallow and even steps, Jessica thought. Man-carved beyond a doubt.

She followed the shadowy movement of Paul’s progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.

Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: "What a beautiful place."

Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind him.

In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest, this basin’s beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.

"Like a fairyland," Paul whispered.

Jessica nodded.

Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth–bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves – all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.

"This must be a Fremen place," Paul said.

"There would have to be people for this many plants to survive," she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit’s catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly acrid wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube’s cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.

Movement caught Paul’s attention – to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them.

He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an up-hop, jump, pop-hop of tiny motion.

"Mice!" he hissed.

Pop-hop-hop! they went, into shadows and out.

Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across the basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.

We needed that reminder, Jessica thought.

Paul continued to stare across the basin. He inhaled, sensed the softly cutting contralto smell of sage climbing the night. The predatory bird–he thought of it as the way of this desert. It had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue-milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paintbrush. There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.

"We’d better find a place to pitch the tent," he said. "Tomorrow we can try to find the Fremen who –"

"Most intruders here regret finding the Fremen!"

It was a heavy masculine voice chopping across his words, shattering the moment. The voice came from above them and to their right.

"Please do not run, intruders," the voice said as Paul made to withdraw into the defile. "If you run you’ll only waste your body’s water."

They want us for the water of our flesh! Jessica thought. Her muscles overrode all fatigue, flowed into maximum readiness without external betrayal. She pinpointed the location of the voice, thinking: Such stealth! I didn’t hear him. And she realized that the owner of that voice had permitted himself only the small sounds, the natural sounds of the desert.

Another voice called from the basin’s rim to their left.

"Make it quick, Stil. Get their water and let’s be on our way. We’ve little enough time before dawn."

Paul, less conditioned to emergency response than his mother, felt chagrin that he had stiffened and tried to withdraw, that he had clouded his abilities by a momentary panic. He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, than fall into the semblance of relaxation, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.

Still, he felt the edge of fear within him and knew its source. This was blind time, no future he had seen... and they were caught between wild Fremen whose only interest was the water carried in the flesh of two unshielded bodies.

This Fremen religious adaptation, then, is the source of what we now recognize as "The Pillars of the Universe," whose Qizara Tafwid are among us all with signs and proofs and prophecy. They bring us the Arrakeen mystical fusion whose profound beauty is typified by the stirring music built on the old forms, but stamped with the new awakening. Who has not heard and been deeply moved by "The Old Man’s Hymn"?


End file.
